YOUR AD HERE »

Exorcist needed for deep green resistance

On Saturday The Aspen Times devoted all of page 3, complete with pretty pictures, to the legal argument by Deep Green Resistance that the Colorado River should be declared a “person” with all the “rights” pertaining thereunto (“Sparkling ‘Person’ality,” News, Oct. 21).

News flash to Deep Green Resistance and its sympathizers at Aspen Journalism and Writers on the Range:

A river is not a person.



The Earth is not a person.

Nature, despite our fondness for calling it “Mother,” is not a person. Indeed, although it is a matrix teeming with organisms, it is not itself even an organism.




It took my ancestors a very long time to rid themselves of animism and pantheism, and settle on the conviction that the “personal” is not to be found in natural creation, but in its Creator. Where there is design, they reasoned, there must be a Designer, and while an artist is indeed a person, his or her artistry is not.

Even Charles Darwin felt this way, while Thomas Huxley and his fellow determinists argued vehemently that nature is a cold, inanimate (Latin for “soulless”) mechanism that couldn’t be any more “impersonal” in the manner in which it nurtures some of us while destroying others.

But all this history of civilization be damned, here come today’s pantheists, eager to confer more legal status on Old Man River than they are willing to grant to an unborn child in the womb.

How enlightened. How compassionate. How noble.

How insane.

Chad Klinger

Basalt